It looks like in practice the most generous of these programs are not accessible to most working poor, so the charts here are more theoretical than practical. It also doesn't address income tax-free earnings (traditional 401k and IRA) - it seems like those generally don't count against your eligibility for programs and could shelter ~25k or more for the self-employed. Not that I imagine most people actually near poverty are maxing out their retirement accounts, even if it theoretically costs them nothing or even gains them value.

It’s not regulatory capture unless the regulatory body itself is controlled by shady grocers. This is just garden variety insufficient regulation. Although if they inspected every day it would probably still be profitable for the state.

The rich own congress. At this point, it's all regulatory capture.

While I agree, for the most part this comes under state regulations. Especially red states are always trying to cut taxes and the government at the cost of not having enough inspectors.

Every store has some stuff that is overpriced compared to peers and some stuff that is underpriced. Dollar stores make their money more on drastic understaffing (leading to the issue in the article) and national scale than they do on being a consistently worse value. They have the cheapest freeze dried strawberries by weight you can get anywhere other than making them yourself.

I get a little paintbrush and paint the leaves of each dandelion with round-up - that ends up killing them but largely leaving other plants alone.

I learned to appreciate the dandelions.

How is this easier than pulling the plant out of the soil?

Dandelions are really, really hard to eradicate by pulling. The roots grow very deep, and if you don't get them completely, the plant can re-grow from what's left.

Even if you do successfully get it out, it really is going to be more work than painting a weed killer on them.

My dad use to have my brother and I work for hours during the summer pulling dandelions in the lawn (to be fair he was out there with us doing it himself also). We each had a knife with about a 4" long blade, we would cut the root as deep as we could and pull the top out. Never really seemed to reduce the number we had.

It depends on the target and the surrounding soil. It’s often easier to pull especially for the random weed that sprouts up around your landscaping. However if you are trying to manage an infestation of invasive species, where the surrounding soil will have a seed bank heavily contaminated with seeds from the years of invasive reproduction, it’s usually a bad idea to merely pull. You can expose soil to sunlight and cause an explosion of dormant seeds. And some nasty invasives are nearly impossible to remove by hand because of their root structure — some species even leave little rhizomes broken off in the soil along the root structure when you pull off the foliage causing a hydra effect.

tl;dr targeted herbicide is a much less evolutionarily selected-for offense, as opposed to hand cultivation which mimics attacks plants have evolved to survive for eons

I did much the same, but with a hypodermic syringe, on knotweed many years ago.

Yours is so much more.. tender though. Poor dandelions, but at least you made it personal!

Is your execute bash command tool open source? It sounds like it solves two of my biggest frustrations with Claude code (especially with work trees).

It's at https://github.com/brianluft/arcadia and the actual MCP server is at https://github.com/brianluft/arcadia/tree/main/server/src. If not suitable as-is, you can probably get Claude to repackage or tweak the code for your needs. The project has a .NET component for the SQL tool that isn't used at all for bash execution; only the Node.js server is needed for the bash tool.

The article itself seems quite reasonable - why do you say the author isn’t interested in logic?

Neither Nvidia nor Tesla were top 7 by valuation in 2019 though - this seems like it heavily relies on cherry picking the most successful stocks over the past 6 years and comparing them against everything else.

Isn't that the entire point? To see what the economy is doing outside of the current bubble?

It’s pretty easy to do it now if you want, you’re just going to have a hard time demonstrating harm for the 38th time your information has been exposed.

My first couple of attempts at antigravity / Gemini were pretty bad - the model kept aborting and it was relatively helpless at tools compared to Claude (although I have a lot more experience tuning Claude to be fair). Seems like there are some good ideas in antigravity but it’s more like an alpha than a product.

They aren’t requiring it though - they are just noting it on your profile. That seems like a very reasonable approach that lets the reader decide how much it matters.

Yep that was my misunderstanding, they aren't being as strict with it as I thought when skimming the article.